76% Indian businesses hit by cyberattacks

Sophos a global leader in network and endpoint security, today announced the findings of its global survey, 7 Uncomfortable Truths of Endpoint Security, which reveal the extent to which Indian businesses are at a risk of repeated cyberattacks and are vulnerable to exploits. It also reveals that IT managers are more likely to catch cybercriminals on their organization’s servers and networks than anywhere else. In fact, IT managers discovered 39 percent of their most significant cyberattacks on their organization’s servers and 34.5 percent on its networks. Only 7.9 percent were discovered on endpoints and 18.8 percent, which is almost double the global average, were found on mobile devices. The survey polled more than 3,100 IT decision makers from mid-sized businesses in 12 countries including the US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, India, and South Africa.

IT security continues to be a major issue across the globe with 68 percent of organisations surveyed hit by cyberattacks in the last year (76.3 percent organisations in India). On an average, organisations impacted by cyberattacks were struck at least twice.

Fourteen percent of IT managers who were victim to one or more cyberattacks last year can’t pinpoint how the attackers gained entry, and 17 percent don’t know how long the threat was in the environment before it was detected, according to the survey. To improve this lack of visibility, IT managers need endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology that exposes threat starting points and the digital footprints of attackers moving laterally through a network.

On average, Indian organizations that investigate one or more potential security incidents each month spend 48 days a year (four days a month) investigating them, according to the survey. It comes as no surprise that IT managers ranked identification of suspicious events (22 percent), alert management (19 percent) and prioritization of suspicious events (13 percent) as the top three features they need from EDR solutions to reduce the time taken to identify and respond to security alerts.

Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they were planning to implement an EDR solution within the next 12 months. Having EDR also helps address a skills gap. Eighty percent of IT managers wish they had a stronger team in place, according to the survey. More information is available on Sophos News.